I-Team: Lottery Losers

ATLANTA (MyFOX ATLANTA) - Alpharetta-based Scientific Games is under investigation over the way it handled a lottery drawing last year. A whistleblower alleged that the company wrongly disqualified winners, then fired her after she complained.

Jean Greenland’s address may have changed when she moved to Georgia a few years back, but her baseball loyalties sure haven’t. So when the NY Lottery launched a scratch off game last year, she bought a couple of tickets on her way home from a family reunion.

She lost those scratch off games, but a true baseball fan never gives up.

“There’s a second chance option on the back that said sign it, send it in, and you could win prizes,” she said from her Marietta home. “I did. And I was amazed to find out that I won something.”

Did she ever. Tons of official Yankees gear, even a framed collection of keepsakes from the final game in the old Yankee Stadium. Greenland won $600 worth of prizes in all.

“I thought I was very lucky to win this and I’m happy to have it,” Greenland said. “And I certainly have a right to it. I’m a fan.”

In all, 6,000 Yankees and Mets fans won similar swag last year in a series of second chance contests. The New York Lottery actually hires a Georgia company to conduct the drawings, Scientific Games in Alpharetta. Former employee Clarissa Jones picked many of the winners, including 10 people who each won $10,000.

But it’s what she’s now telling authorities and the I-Team that could leave any lottery player with some mega concerns.

“In your opinion, was the drawing fair?” asked I-Team reporter Randy Travis. “No, it was not,” she told him.

The NY lottery Second Chance Major League Baseball Drawing is one of many that Scientific Games has handled across the country. The question now being investigated by the NY lottery: did the folks in Georgia forget about the rulebook and turn countless numbers of winners into truly unlucky losers?

When it came time for the NY drawing, Jones would wear a blindfold, spending hours picking envelopes from the 148,000 losing scratch off tickets mailed in for a second chance at a prize.

But after she finished drawing the winners, Jones said she noticed her boss, drawing manager Kelley Wallace, would order some of the winners disqualified.

“At one point some people were disqualified for not having a (NY) postmark,” said Jones. “However, the procedures don’t clearly state anything about them having to be postmarked in NY.”

Jones alerted the NY Lottery, including copies of some of those disqualified winners in her complaint.

One of those disqualified winners was Lisa Vigna, a Manhattan attorney and an avid Yankees fan who mailed her tickets from Washington, DC.

“I made sure I had them in the standard sized envelope,” she remembered. “But nothing said postmarked from you know, NY.”

She’s right. The rules on the ticket say nothing about a New York postmark. The NY Lottery would only say that question is part of their investigation. A Scientific Games spokesperson insists winners had to mail their tickets from NY.

But the I-Team talked to NY lottery players around the country who say they mailed their tickets in from other states and still won.

Remember lucky Jean Greenland of Marietta? “When I got home to Georgia after a couple of days I mailed it from here,” she said.

That didn’t sit well with Manhattan attorney Lisa Vigna. “How could she win from Georgia and mail them in from GA and how could I be disqualified from mailing them in not from NY when she didn’t mail them in from NY herself?”

Some of the envelopes Jones sent to lottery investigators have writing on the outside showing the winners were disqualified for having no signature. Ellen and Don Vecchiarello didn’t sign the back of their tickets for fear of identity theft. They play the lottery a lot. But according to the writing on their envelopes, having no signature is how the Vecchiarellos lost not once but twice.

Both the NY Lottery and Scientific Games agree even though there’s a place on the back of the card for a signature, you don’t have to sign it to win.

“To me, there’s something wrong,” said Don Vecchiarello. “Either that, or the people who are holding this lottery have no idea what the rules are themselves.”

Despite what’s written on their envelopes, a Scientific Games spokesperson says the Vecchiarellos were disqualified because they mailed their entries from Connecticut instead of New York.

The spokesperson says the drawing staff in Georgia understood all along you did not need a signature to win. But in an audio recording secretly made by Jones in the fifth and final NY second chance lottery, you can hear drawing manager Kelley Wallace telling her staff that they should disqualify anyone who didn’t sign their card. At one point, you can even hear her disqualifying a $10,000 grand prize winner.

The reason?

“Because there’s no signature,” Wallace said on the recording.

But remember, the rules don’t require a signature, rules the company insists it clearly understood